Changes of the Week

In his little Manhattan glue and plywood store, one day in 1921, Proprietor Lawrence Ottinger turned to a 20-year-old helper and said : "Tony, there's a great future in this business. It's barely starting, and you're right on the ground floor with me." On the boss's advice, young S. W. ("Tony") Antoville, a Columbia University student, gave up his plans to go to law school, kept his job in the store and insured his future. As the U.S. Plywood Corp. (TIME, Sept. 25, 1950), Lawrence Ottinger's little store became the biggest maker of plywood in the world (1952 sales: $108 million). This week, as Ottinger, 69, moved up to chairman, Tony Antoville, 52, took over as president.

Antoville plans to keep U.S. Plywood's sales rising with such products as Novoply, a composition board made from wood chips and shavings, and Zeprex, a Swedish-developed building material (made of cement, water and chemicals) that looks like concrete but can be sawed, chopped and nailed. Another U.S. Plywood plan for expansion: invasion of the wholesale lumber field, using logs cut from its own forests but not suitable for plywood.

Into the presidency of Manhattan's Todd Shipyards Corp., one of the three largest in the U.S., last week stepped burly, black-haired Joseph Haag Jr., 57, replacing John D. Reilly, 65, who moved up to chairman. An alumnus of Stevens Institute of Hoboken, N.J., Haag (rhymes with vague) started with Todd as a boilermaker after a World War I Navy hitch, rose steadily, became secretary of the company in 1937. As a vice president in 1940, he conducted negotiations with the British that resulted in Todd building two new shipyards to build 60 ships, which were the forerunners of the U.S.'s own World War II Liberty ships. A dedicated whittler in leisure moments, Haag gets away from ships by whittling model trains.

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